Memoir of the Hours
by The Infamous Wootermelon
Summary: Time: a trickle, a laborer, carrying the heaviest burden of them all. We saw with eyes that were clear with objectivity. The culmination of PoA seen through the perspective of time. Oneshot, PoA spoilers


_**Memoir of the Hours**_

_Disclaimer:_ I own the plot and original concepts, characters, et cetera. Everything else belongs to its respective creator(s).

Time: a trickle, a laborer, carrying the heaviest burden of them all. We saw with eyes that were clear with objectivity. We didn't slow down or speed up according to whim, shorten joy and prolong agony, contrary to what you thought. And you still think that, despite the truth of it right in front of you. _You_ were blinded by sentiment, human sentiment. No, we knew only facts, what was felt. The sovereign plural _we_, not the singular _me_, powerful in our multitudes, we were time. We passed by in the blink of an instant, not disturbing our surroundings, only paying attention to our loads. We were countless, gone in an interval of time too short for anyone to be able to discern, a fraction of a fraction to the umpteenth degree. We were time, pitiless and merciless, sullen-faced workers.

Then we, the omnipotent, the destroyer of the greatest of empires and kings, we fell. We were manipulated, controlled, enslaved. We used to be terrible, feared by gods who had the brush of immortality and by the dying – yes, they were dying, even as they were alive and breathing, every moment spent in life a moment closer to death. We were past and present and future. We were omnipotent, and then compressed and powerless.

The first time we were compressed, it was agonizing, startling and painful. Blurred in a tangled smear of chaos, the future and past and present coinciding, falling into step next to each other instead of in a single file line, we hated. Then we seethed, that place in time jumbled with everything happening all at once. The past replayed and the future fused in a clumsy line into the stumbling past. Terrible, pain, compression and then done with and over, everything back into proper alignment.

We knew it would happen again, that magic had found a way to manipulate us with spells and an hourglass in which the grains of sand fell and fluttered, movements controlled by gravity. Those were the times in which the past and future were forced to coexist, beside each other, neither surviving without the other. The edges were ragged.

We watched at the castle, the school. The hippogriff was executed, a strong chop to its neck severing its head. Blood, blood, fertilizing the pumpkin patch, a giant crying into the wild tangles of his black beard. Two boys and a girl watched. The girl we hated. She'd compressed us. We were used to the compression, but we hated it. The pain was dull, the yoke slung across countless shoulders. It was a torture we became accustomed to, but it was torture. We hated it.

A dog, growling, tackled the gangly boy. He was shaggy-furred, dark, unkempt and wild-looking, just as he was in his human form. Gaunt but strong, fired with madness, another prisoner of the wizards, but he was one of them. Him we could feel strangely about. He caused us no pain, his wild eyes. We had passed and watched him grow thinner and wane before bursting into obsession-fueled life. His skin was waxy; he was a cadaver, the bare bones of humanity. He was a skeleton molded with sallow white skin. His eyes were a set of holes in his head, fathomless, burning.

The black-haired boy and the hated girl chased after him. The compression had already begun. Now those two bided their time with a hippogriff, the dead one, but in the future-past compression, he was escaped, alive. A decapitated cadaver and a living creature and both had existed. We watched how it played out, but we knew everything, we knew how it would end. And still we watched as we dragged our burdens, the intervals.

A werewolf followed by a hook-nosed man, who took the invisibility cloak at the base of the frozen tree, left by the hated girl and the black-haired boy. The confessions, anger in the miserable shack that the passage under the avenging, wrathful tree led to, the violence were all familiar to us. We watched sullenly as the compression worsened. There was no need to watch. We knew. But we watched.

The rat transformed into a mangy, rat-like man, a pitiful excuse for a man. Blubbering, a baby, as if time had left him untouched and he was still yearning for his mother's milk. A man that we despised, one who was as puerile as he had been a countless number of us laborers ago, in that single file line, untouched by the weight of our loads. We hated those things we could not change.

And the full moon was up. They picked the wrong time for this. The compression would save them for now, the terrible compression we hated. The werewolf transformed and the hated girl and the black-haired boy who were traveling, they went to the lake while their past-counterparts did too. The past black-haired boy, he tried to save the gaunt dog-man. No, he couldn't. But his future counterpart did. The black shapes that sucked the happy memories and left only coldness, they fled.

The hook-nosed man, who'd been knocked out by the two boys and that hated girl, took the past black-haired boy and hated girl and dog-man. They were all unconscious, but the future boy had saved them. Now we were beginning to shift back into our line, future and present and past in our line. The future black-haired boy and hated girl rescued the dog-man from the prison he was in.

In another part of the castle, an old man was telling the girl, that hated girl, what to do. To compress us, force us together. And as she and the black-haired boy disappeared, that hourglass around their necks, they ran into that same room.

We straightened in our queue, the alignment perfect.

Everything was right again.


End file.
